Kearns Could Hit the Bonds Ball Lottery

Network News

It has happened to Austin Kearns before at AT&T Park in San Francisco. Kearns has drifted back from his spot in right field, watched a ball leave the park for a home run, then watched as it bounced back onto the field of play.

"I just pick it up," Kearns said, "and toss it in the crowd."

Now, though, Kearns has a dilemma, one he's not sure how to handle. What if Barry Bonds's 756th homer -- the shot that will break Hank Aaron's all-time record -- bounces from the stands back to Kearns?

"I have no idea," Kearns said.

But he has thought about it, first perhaps a week ago, when Bonds was at 754. Kearns's Washington Nationals open a four-game series against the Giants tonight, and though the left-handed hitting Bonds is perfectly capable of knocking one out to left field -- No. 755 was an opposite-field shot -- odds are that he will pull it, and the ball will go over Kearns's head.

Odds, too, dictate that the ball would either stay in the stands or, if Bonds truly crushes his signature moment, would splash into the water of McCovey Cove, where kayakers await.

But Bonds's 755th homer -- which came Saturday night at San Diego's Petco Park -- hit the upper deck and nearly bounced back into the field before the lower level gobbled it up. So Kearns spent the last couple of days asking around.

"What are my options?" he said. "I could put it in my back pocket."

That brought a split opinion from the court of the Nationals' clubhouse.

"I'd keep it," first baseman Dmitri Young said. "And I'd double-dog dare a fan to come get it from me."

The ball, after all, could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars -- or more.

"You can't keep it," third baseman Ryan Zimmerman said. "Then you'd be like [Doug] Mienkiewicz," he said, remembering the former Boston first baseman, who infamously kept the ball he caught for the final out of the 2004 World Series before finally giving it to the Hall of Fame. "You don't want to be that guy. Plus, it's not like the money from that ball would change our lives like it might for someone else."